Hans Morgenthau, "We Are Deluding Ourselves in Vietnam," New
York Times Magazine, 18 April 1965

The address President Johnson delivered on AprIl 7, 1965 at Johns Hopkins University
is important for two reasons. On the one hand, the President has shown for the
first time a way out of the impasse in which we find ourselves in Vietnam. By
agreeing to negotiations without preconditions he has opened the door to negotiations
which those preconditions had made impossible from the outset.

By proposing a project for the economic development of Southeast Asia—with
North Vietnam a beneficiary and the Soviet Union a supporter—he has implicitly
recognized the variety of national interests in the communist world and the
need for varied American responses tailored to those interests. By asking “that
the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own coun¬try in their
own way.” he has left all possibilities open for future evolution of relations
between North and South Vietnam.

On the other hand, the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and
policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible
to extricate ourselves. The President has linked our involvement in Vietnam
with our war of independence and has proclaimed the freedom of all nations as
the goal of our foreign policy. He has started from the assumption that there
are two Vietnamese nations, one of which has attacked the other, and he sees
that attack as an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression. Consistent
with this assumption, the President is willing to negotiate with China and North
Vietnam but not with the Viet Cong.

Yet we cannot have it both ways. We cannot at the same time embrace these
false assumptions and pursue new sound policies. Thus we are faced with a real
dilemma. This dilemma is by no means of the President’s making.

We are militarily engaged in Vietnam by virtue of a basic principle of our
foreign policy that was implicit in the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and was put
into practice by John Foster Dulies from 1954 onward. This principle is the
military containment of Communism. Containment had its origins in Europe; Dulles
applied it to the Middle East and Asia through a series of bilateral and multilateral
alliances. Yet what was an outstanding success In Europe turned out to be a
dismal failure elsewhere. The reasons for that failure are twofold.

First, the threat that faced the nations of Western Europe in the aftermath
of the Second World War was primarily military. It was the threat of the Red
Army marching westward. Behind the line of military demarcation of 1945 which
the policy of containment declared to be the westernmost limits of the Soviet
empire there was an ancient civilization, only temporarily weak and able to
maintain itself against the threat of Communist subversion.

The situation is different in the Middle East and Asia. The threat there is
not primarily military but political in nature. Weak governments and societies
provide opportunities for Communist subversion. Military containment is irrelevant
to that threat and may even be counter-productive. Thus the Baghdad Pact did
not protect Egypt from Soviet influence and SEATO has had no bearing on Chinese
influence in Indonesia and Pakistan.

Second and more important, even If China were threatening her neighbors primarily
by military means, it would be impossible to contain her by erecting a military
wall at the periphery of her empire. For China is, even in her present underdeveloped
state, the dominant power in Asia. She is this by virtue of the quality and
quantity of her population, her geographic position, her civilization, her past
power remembered and her future power anticipated. Anybody who has traveled
in Asia with his eyes and ears open must have been impressed by the enormous
impact which the resurgence of China has made upon all manner of men, regardless
of class and political conviction, from Japan to Pakistan.

The issue China poses is politicaI and cultural predominance. The United States
can no more contain Chinese influence in Asia by arming South Vietnam and Thailand
than China could contain American influence in the Western Hemisphere by arming,
say, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

If we are convinced that we cannot live with a China predominant on the mainland
of Asia, then we must strike at the heart of Chinese power—that is, rather
than try to contain the power of China, we must try to destroy that power itself.
Thus there is logic on the side of that small group of Americans who are convinced
that war between the United States and China is inevitable and that the earlier
it comes the better will be the chances for the United States to win it.

Yet, while logic is on their side, practical judgment is against them. For
while China is obviously no match for the United States in overall power, China
is largely immune to the specific types of power in which the superiority of
the United States consists— that is, nuclear, air and naval power. Certainly,
the United States has the power to destroy the nuclear installations and the
major industrial and population centers of China, but this destruction would
not defeat China; it would only set her development back. To be defeated, China
has to be conquered.

Physical conquest would require the deployment of millions of American soldiers
on the mainland of Asia. No American military leader has ever advocated a course
of action so fraught with incalculable risks, so uncertain of outcome, requiring
sacrifices so out of proportion to the interests at stake and the benefits to
be expected. President Eisenhower declared on February 10, 1954, that he "could
conceive of no greater tragedy than for the United States to become involved
in an all-out war in Indochina.” General MacArthur, in the Congressional
hearings concerning his dismissal and in personal conversation with President
Kennedy, emphatically warned against sending American foot soldiers to the Asian
mainland to fight China.

If we do not want to set ourselves goals which cannot be attained with the
means we are willing to employ, we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the
predominance of China on the Asian mainland. It is instructive to note that
those Asian nations which have done so—such as Burma and Cambodia--live
peacefully in the shadow of the Chinese giant.

This modus vivendi, composed of legal independence and various degrees
of actual dependence, has indeed been for more than a millennium the persistent
pattern of Chinese predominance in Southeast Asia. The military conquest of
Tibet is the sole exception to that pattern. The military operations at the
Indian border do not diverge from it, since their purpose was the establishment
of a frontier disputed by both sides.

On the other hand, those Asian nations which have allowed themselves to be
transformed into outposts of American military power—such as Laos a few
years ago, South Vietnam and Thailand—have become the actual or prospective
victims of Communist aggression and subversion. Thus it appears that peripheral
military containment is counterproductive. Challenged at its periphery by American
military power at its weakest—that is, by the proxy of client-states—China
or its proxies respond with locally superior military and political power.

In specific terms, accommodation means four things: (1) recognition of the
political and cultural predominance of China on the mainland of Asia as a fact
of life; (2) liquidation of the peripheral military containment of China; (3)
strengthening of the uncommitted nations of Asia by nonmilitary means; (4) assessment
of Communist governments in Asta In terms not of Communist doctcine but of their
relation to the interests and power of the United States.

In the light of these principles, the alternative to our present policies
in Vietnam would be this: a face-saving agreement which would allow us to disengage
ourselves militarily in stages spaced in time; restoration of the status quo
of the Geneva Agreement of 1954. with special emphasis upon all-Vietnamese elections;
cooperation with the Soviet Union in support of a Titoist all-vietnamese Government,
which would be likely to emerge from such elections.

This last point is crucial, for our present policies not only drive Hanoi
into the waiting arms of Peking, but also make it very difficult for Moscow
to pursue an independent policy. Our interests In Southeast Asia are identical
with those of the Soviet Union: to prevent the expansion of the military power
of China. But while our present policies invite that expansion, they make it
impossible for the Soviet Union to join us in preventing it. If we were to reconcile
ourselves to the establishment of a Titoist government
in all of Vietnam, the Soviet Union could successfully compete with China in
claiming credit for it and surreptitiously cooperate with us in maintaining
it.

Testing the President’s proposals by these standards, one realizes how
far they go in meeting them. These proposals do not preclude a return to the
Geneva agreement and even assume the existence of a Titoist government in North
Vietnam. Nor do they preclude the establishment of a Titoist government for
all of Vietnam, provided the people of South Vietnam have freely agreed to it.
They also envision the active participation of the Soviet Union in establishing
and maintaining a new balance of power in Southeast Asia. On the other hand,
the President has flatly rejected a withdrawal “under the cloak of meaningless
agreement." The controlling word is obviously "meaningless,”
and only the future can tell whether we shall consider any face-saving agreement
as "meaningless” regardless of its political context.

However, we are under a psychological compulsion to continue our military
presence in South Vietnam as part of the peripheral military containment of
China. We have been emboldened in this course of action by the identification
of the enemy as “Communist,” seeing in every Communist party and
regime an extension of hostile Russian or Chinese power. This identification
was justified 15 to 20 years ago when Communism still had a monolithic character.
Here, as elsewhere, our modes of thought and action have been rendered obsolete
by new developments.

It is ironic that this simple juxtaposition of Communism” and ‘free
world” was erected by John Foster Dulles’s crusading moralism into
the guiding principle of American foreign policy at a time when the national
Communism of Yugoslavia, the neutralism of the third world and the incipient
split between the Soviet Union and China were rendering that juxtaposition invalid.

Today, it is belaboring the obvious to say that we are faced not with one
monolithic Communism whose uniform hostility must be countered with equally
uniform hostility, but with a number of different Communisms whose hostility,
determined by different national interests, varies. In fact, the United States
encounters today less hostility from Tito, who is a Communist, than from de
Gaulle, who is not.

We can today distinguish four different types of Communism in view of the
kind and degree of hostility to the United States they represent: a Communism
identified with the Soviet Union—e.g., Poland; a Communism identified
with China—e.g., Albania; a Communism that straddles the fence between
the Soviet Union and China—e.g., Rumania; and independent Communism—e.g..
Yugoslavia. Each of these Communisms must be dealt with in terms of the bearing
its foreign policy has upon the interests of the United States in a concrete
instance.

It would, of course, be absurd to suggest that the officials responsible for
the conduct of American foreign policy are unaware of these distinctions and
of the demands they make for discriminating subtlety. Yet it is an obvious fact
of experience that these officials are incapable of living up to these demands
when they deal with Vietnam.

Thus they maneuver themselves into a position which is anti-revolutionary
per so and which requires military opposition to revolution wherever it is found
in Asia, regardless of how it affects the interests—and how susceptible
it is to the power—of the United States. There is a historic precedent
for this kind of policy: Metternich’s military opposition to liberalism
after the Napoleonic Wars, which collapsed in 1848. For better or for worse,
we live again in an age of revolution. It is the task of statesmanship not to
oppose what cannot be opposed without a chance of success, but to bend it to
one’s own interests. This is what the President is trying to do with his
proposal for the economic development of Southeast Asia.

Why do we support the Saigon Government in the Civil War against the Viet Cong?
Because the Saigon Government is "free” and the Viet Cong are "Communist."
By containing Vietnamese Communism, we assume that we are really containing
the Communism of China.

Yet this assumption is at odds with the historic experience of a millennium
and is unsupported by contemporary evidence. China is the hereditary enemy of
Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh will become the leader of a Chinese satellite only
if the United States forces him to become one.

Furthermore, Ho Chi MInh, like Tito and unlike the Communist governments of
the other states of Eastern Europe, came to power not by courtesy of another
Communist nation’s victorious army but at the head of a victorious army
of his own. He is, then, a natural candidate to become an Asian Tito, and the
question we must answer is: How adversely would a Titoist Ho Chi Minh, governing
all of Vietnam, affect the interests of the United States? The answer can only
be: not at all. One can even maintain the proposition that, far from affecting
adversely the interests of the United States, It would be in the interest of
the United States if the western periphery of China were ringed by a chain of
independent states, though they would, of course, in their policies take due
account of the predominance of their powerful neighbor.

The roots of the Vietnamese civil war go back to the very beginning of South
Vietnam as an independent state. When President Ngo Dinh Diem took office in
1954, he presided not over a state but over one-half of a country arbitrarily
and, in the intentions of all concerned, temporarily severed from the other
half. He was generally regarded as a caretaker who would establish the rudiments
of an administration until the country was united by nationwide elections to
be held in 1956 in accordance with the Geneva accords.

Diem was confronted at home with a number of private armies which were politically,
religiously or criminally oriented. To the general surprise, he subdued one
after another and created what looked like a viable government. Yet in the process
of creating it, he also laid the foundations to the present civil war. He ruthlessly
suppressed all opposition, established concentration camps, organized a brutal
secret police, closed newspapers and rigged elections. These policies inevitably
led to a polarization of the policies of South Vietnam—on one side, Diem’s
family, surrounded by a Pretorian guard; on the other, the Vietnamese people,
backed by the Communists, declaring themselves liberators from foreign domination
and internal oppression.

Thus, the possibility of civil war was inherent in the very nature of the
Diem regime. It became inevitable after Diem refused to agree to all-Vietnamese
elections and, in the face of mounting popular alienation, accentuated the tyrannical
aspects of his regime. The South Vietnamese who cherished freedom could not
help but oppose him. Threatened by the secret police, they went either abroad
or underground where the Communists were waiting for them.

Until the end of last February [1965], the Government of the United States
started from the assumption that the war in South Vietnam was a civil war, aided
and abetted—but not created from abroad, and spokesmen for the Government
have made time and again the point that the key to winning the war was political
and not military and was to be found in South Vietnam itself. It was supposed
to lie in transforming the indifference or hostility of the great mass of the
South Vietnamese people into positive loyalty to the Government.

To that end, a new theory of warfare called “counterinsurgency"
was put into practice. Strategic hamlets were established, massive propaganda
campaigns were embarked upon, social and economic measures were at least sporadically
taken. But all was to no avail. The mass of the population remained indifferent,
if not hostile, and large units of the army ran away or went over to the enemy.

The reasons for this failure are of general significance, for they stem from
a deeply ingrained habit of the American mind, We like to think of social problems
as technically self-sufficient and susceptible of simple, clear-cut solutions.
We tend to think of foreign aid as a kind of self-sufficient, economic enterprise
subject to the laws of economics and divorced from politics, and of war as a
similarly self-sufficient, technical enterprise, to be won as quickly, as cheaply.
as thoroughly as possible and divorced from the foreign policy that preceded
and is to follow it. Thus our military theoreticians and practitioners conceive
of counterinsurgency as though it were just another branch of warfare, to be
taught in special schools and applied with technical proficiency wherever the
occasion arises.

This view derives of course from a complete misconception of the nature of
civil war. People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which
appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a
chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.

Magsaysay could subdue the Huk rebellion in the Philippines because his charisma,
proven in action, aroused a faith superior to that of his opponents. In South
Vietnam there is nothing to oppose the faith of the Viet Cong and, In consequence,
the Saigon Government and we are losing the civil war.

A guerrilla war cannot be won without the active support of the indigenous
population, short of the physical extermination of that population. Germany
was at least consistent when, during the Second World War, faced with unmanageable
guerrilla warfare throughout occupied Europe, she tried to master the situation
through a deliberate policy of extermination. The French tried ‘counterinsurgency”
in Algeria and failed; 400,000 French troops fought the guerrillas in Indochina
for nine years and failed.

The United States has recognized that it is falling in SouthVietnam. But it
has drawn from this recognition of failure a most astounding conclusion.

The United States has decided to change the character of the war by unilateral
declaration from a South Vietnamese civil war to a war of "foreign aggression.”
"Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign
to Conquer South Vietnam" is the title of a white paper published by the
Department of State on the last day of February, 1965. While normally foreign
and military policy is based upon intelligence—that is, the objective
assessment of the facts—the process is here reversed: a new policy has
been decided upon, and intelligence must provide the facts to justify it.

The United States, stymied in South Vietnam and on the verge of defeat, decided
to carry the war to North Vietnam not so much in order to retrieve the fortunes
of war as to lay the groundwork for "negotiations from strength.”
In order to justify that new policy, it was necessary to prove that North Vietnam
is the real enemy. It is the white paper’s purpose to present that proof.

Let it be said right away that the white paper is a dismal failure. The discrepancy
between its assertions and the factual evidence adduced to support them borders
on the grotesque. It does nothing to disprove, and tends even to confirm, what
until the end of February had been official American doctrine: that the main
body of the Viet Cong is composed of South Vietnamese and that 80 per cent to
90 per cent of their weapons are of American origin.

This document is most disturbing in that it provides a particularly glaring
instance of the tendency to conduct foreign and military policy not on their
own merits, but as exercises in public relations. The Government fashions an
imaginary world that pleases it, and then comes to believe in the reality of
that world and acts as though it were real.

It is for this reason that public officials are so resentful of the reporters
assigned to Vietnam and have tried to shut them off from the sources of news
and even to silence them. They resent the confrontation of their policies with
the facts. Yet the facts are what they are, and they take terrible vengeance
on those who disregard them.

However, the white paper is but the latest instance of a delusionary tendency
which has led American policy in Vietnam astray in other respects: We call the
American troops in Vietnam "advisers” and have assigned them by and
large to advisory functions, and we have limited the activities of the Marines
who have now landed in Vietnam to guarding American installations. We have done
this for reasons of public relations, in order to spare ourselves the odium
of open belligerency.

There is an ominous similarity between this technique and that applied to
the expedition in the Bay of Pigs, We wanted to overthrow Castro, but for reasons
of public relations we did not want to do it ourselves. So it was not done at
all, and our prestige was damaged far beyond what It would have suffered had
we worked openly and single-mindedly for the goal we had set ourselves.

Our very presence in Vietnam is in a sense dictated by considerations of public
relations; we are afraid lest our prestige would suffer were we to retreat from
an untenable position.

One may ask whether we have gained prestige by being involved in a civil war
on the mainland of Asia and by being unable to win it. Would we gain more by
being unable to extricate ourselves from it, and by expanding it unilaterally
into an international war? Is French prestige lower today than it was 11 years
ago when France was fighting in Indochina, or five years ago when France was
fighting in Algeria? Does not a great power gain prestige by mustering the wisdom
and courage necessary to liquidate a losing enterprise? In other words, is it
not the mark of greatness, in circumstances such as these, to be able to afford
to be indifferent to one’s prestige?

The peripheral military containment of China, the indiscriminate crusade against
Communism, counterinsurgency as a technically self-sufficient new branch of
warfare, the conception of foreign and military policy as a branch of public
relations—they are-all misconceptions that conjure up terrible dangers
for those who base their policies on them.

One can only hope and pray that the vaunted pragmatism and common sense of
the American mind—of which the President’s new proposals may well
be a manifestation—will act as a corrective upon those misconceptions
before they lead us from the blind alley in which we find ourselves today to
the rim of the abyss. Beyond the present crisis, however, one must hope that
the confrontation between these misconceptions and reality will teach us a long-overdue
lesson—to rid ourselves of these misconceptions altogether.